I mean, it depends on how much weight you want to add.

According to the internet, a penny weighs 2.5g or 0.088oz. A roll of pennies costs 50c and adds 125g or 4.4oz.

Some prints I’ve added just a few pennies to, and some a few rolls. It just depends what you need.

My solution has been pennies. They’re cheap and and easy to get. Since they are a fixed size, it’s really easy to model a cavity for them in your slicer. You can also leave them in their rolls for bigger projects.

Sounds like you’ve done your research.

A friend of mine has a Qidi X-Max 3, so I got to play around with it quite a bit. It is a beast! And apparently their support is top notch. I’m definitely going to look at Qidi next time I’m in the market.

All that said, the Q1 is not the same class of printer as the X-Max 3. It seems like it makes some compromises to hit the price it does. If you are looking for amazing build quality or extremely large prints, you probably want to save up for something like their Plus4. But if you don’t care about those things, or don’t want to spend more, the Q1 seems like a great choice.

As far as the polydrier goes, it seems good, but expensive. I’ve had a good experience just using my printer’s heatbed to dry filament and using vacuum bags with redried dessicants. The bags are like $1-2 each, so even if 1/4 of them are leaky, it’s still way cheaper than dry boxes. And I just collect the dessicants from my new filament spools and redry them in the microwave.

I haven’t printed nylon, but I know you can get the cereal box dryboxes for like $7 each. If you plan to have tons of rolls of nylon, then it may be worth getting a full drying system, but for only a few rolls, I’d stick to cereal boxes.

If I were in your situation, I’d cheap out on the storage and put that extra ~$100 towards a Plus4 or some cool filament.

My current printer is a MK3S+, and I love that Prusa is still pushing firmware updates for it. However, my personal experience with the machine has been pretty lackluster with multiple parts breaking and sub-par print quality. In fact, something else just broke yesterday (I have yet to diagnose exactly what) which is making me more eager to upgrade. I do wonder if I just got unlucky considering their reputation, but I can’t say I’m rushing back to then with enthusiasm.

I do agree with your general point about open source. For that reason, the Prusa, Voron, and Ratrig are the most intriguing options. However, if one of the other two are likely to provide a better experience, I think it’s silly to not even consider them.